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Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Guest Post: Kim Yanoshik looks back at the 37th Cleveland International Film Festival

[The following is a guest post by blogger Kim Yanoshik. Kim lives in Lakewood, and in
addition to being a film fanatic is also an incurable
shutterbug. She shares some of her photos on her blog
Lakewood Daily Snap.]

The movie starved hordes wait in line at the 37th Cleveland International Film Festival. Photo by Kim Yanoshik.

Last week the Cleveland Movie Blog's
main man, Bob Ignizio, contacted me and asked if I would share some
of my experiences and favorite films from this year's 37th Cleveland
International Film Festival. Maybe I was infected with
film fever or perhaps I was simply feeling foolish, but I told Bob
yes, I'd be honored to write a guest post.

For me, as for many Clevelanders, The
Cleveland International Film Festival (CIFF) is one of the best
things about living here on the north coast. This year I was
able to take a vacation from real life and go on a stay-cation and
embrace my reel life.

Reel life entails sitting in the
dark, visiting dozens of countries, and experiencing the entire gamut
of human emotions from sorrow to joy thanks to the talents and magic
of the world's filmmakers. In addition to the films, the truly
marvelous thing about reel life is being part of the spontaneous
community which emerges at CIFF.

Each year the CIFF grows and sets new
records. Similar to the festival, I too seem to break records
from year to year - whether it is a record for the number of films
seen or in the growing number of familiar faces and what I call my
"reel" friends. Reel friends are folks seen only
during the festival or in rare serendipitous encounters outside of
the festival. Because of our shared love of film, reel
friends are the same as real friends - for when you meet up with a
reel friend there is an ease of conversation that is at both
comforting and joyful - even if one disagrees about the merits of a
particular film.

Dafna Yachin, the director of Digital Dharma, and Pamela Cerio a sponsor of the film. Photo by Kim Yanoshik

This year's festival showed a total of
180 features and 164 shorts from 65 different countries; over the
course of eleven days, I saw a total of 47 feature films and 6 short
films from 25 different countries. To those who don't
take a festival long vacation, the number of films I saw may seem
staggering. For those of us who put real life on hold, my
number is probably pretty average.

Of the feature films
I saw, 26 were narratives and 21 were documentaries. Although I
love short films, I don't go to many short films during the
festival. I have been very privileged that for the last several
years I've been on the festival's selection committee. From
September through January members of the CIFF selection committee
watch scores films. The committee is broken up into three groups -
narratives, documentaries and shorts. I am in the groups that
watches primarily shorts. Of course, most of the films I
see don't make the cut after: all, hundreds, if not thousands, of
films are submitted to the festival each year for consideration.

I
don't know if I was lucky or if the quality of the films is better,
but none of the films I chose to see this year were losers. Now
don't get me wrong, this is not to say that I've seen lots of losers
in past years, but I do recall several films over the years which
gave me pause in terms of their overall attributes and had me
wondering how they made it into the festival.

It is almost impossible to chose one
favorite film from the festival as there are so many genres and so
many other variables about a film which can distinguishes it from the
flock. For film, as with other art forms, "beauty" is
in the eye of the beholder. When we watch a film we each bring our
own history and our own sensibilities into our evaluation of a film.
That said, I'd like to share my short list of favorite films - I have
chosen three narrative films and three favorite documentary films.

My Top 3 Narrative films:

WHEN DAY BREAKS
– listed as from Serbia, Croatia and France, this
film tells the moving story of a Misha Brankov, a retired music
professor who discovers his Jewish heritage when a small metal box is
unearthed during a excavation project on the grounds where many of
the city's poor and dispossessed currently live. The site was first
home to the Belgrade's fairgrounds and then was later used by the
Nazi's as a concentration camp where thousands of Jews and Gypsies
were killed. The box contains a photograph of Misha when he was two
years old with his birth parents, a letter to him from parents, and
an unfinished musical score entitled "When Day Breaks"
written by his father. The film poignantly portrays
Misha's journey as he accepts and understands his origins and sets
out to finish and perform his father's unfinished composition. An
intense and powerful film.

KUMA – Another intense and
powerful drama, this Austrian film is a compelling and compassionate
drama that concerns a large and complex Turkish family living in
Vienna. From the opening scene of a wedding in a small rural village
in Turkey to the film's final scene in an apartment in cosmopolitan
Vienna this at times claustrophobic domestic drama dishes up one
twist after another. The title of the film, kuma, comes from the
Turkish term for second wife, a position which applies to Ayse, one
of the films principal characters and is the film's first big
surprise or twist.

KEY OF LIFE – This film is a
hilarious black comedy from Japan about identity mistaken, lost,
found and ultimately created. The story centers around two men:
the suave, obsessive-compulsive Kondo, who it turns out receives
large sums of money by "getting rid of people," and
Sakurai, a desperate and depressed 35 year old actor who is so
unlucky he can't even successfully commit suicide.
Sakurai works up such a sweat after his botched attempt to hang
himself he decides to spend the few yen he has by going to the local
bath house. Meanwhile, despite his precautions on a job, Kondo
notices a small spot of blood on his wrist and on the wristband of
his watch, near the bath house Kondo stops to clean up. After
undressing, storing his possessions, and putting a band with the
locker key on his wrist, Kondo slips on a bar of soap and hits his
head. Kondo's slip is so dramatic that the wristband with his locker
key goes flying off and lands far from his unconscious body.
Sakurai, who noticed the huge wad or cash in Kondo's wallet,
views Kondo's misfortune as his lucky break. Before the unconscious
man is hauled off to the hospital, Sakurai switches his locker key
with Kondo's. What ensues next is a madcap romp with a story so
quirky, charming and amusing that it is downright criminal.

My Favorite 3 Documentary films:

G-DOG – This is an inspiring
film about Greg Boyle, a visionary Jesuit priest who has devoted his
life to improving the lives and opportunities of East L.A.
gangbangers. Father Boyle, who is also called G-Dog, Father
Greg or Father G, created Homeboys Industries built on Father Greg's
motto: "Nothing stops a bullet like a job," and on the
foundation of love.

ELEMENTAL -
This documentary by filmmakers Gayatri Roshan and Emmanuel
Vaugh-Lee focuses on three incredible individuals in different parts
of the world who are trying to save our planet: Jay Harmon, an
Australian scientist and innovator, Eriel Deranger, a first nation
activist, and Rajendra Singh, an Indian governmental official.
Harmon's quest is to create technologies which can stop global
warming, and it seems he is very close to making significant progress
by incorporating lessons from nature itself. Deranger is
working tirelessly to save her people and her people's land (not to
mention the planet) from the destructive effects of mining the Tar
Sands and the world's largest industrial development and pipeline
project. Singh is making tremendous inroads into saving the
Ganges River - revered by the Indian people as "Mother Ganga"
the river faces extinction due to unregulated industries, dams, and
misuse and abuse by people living near its banks. The film is
visually breathtaking with its seamless, accessible and inspiring
storytelling this film can be a valuable tool as we try to solve our
planet's ecological problems.

DIGITAL DHARMA: ONE MAN'S MISSION TO
SAVE A CULTURE – From U.S. filmmaker Dafna Yachin, this film
shares Gene Smith's epic 50- year journey to find, preserve and
digitize more than 20,000 volumes of ancient Tibetan manuscripts.
Born in Utah to a Mormon family, Smith seems like an unlikely
candidate to devote his life to preserving Tibetan culture.
However, even as a child Smith had a passion and talent for studying
and learning languages. As he grew older the more obscure the
language the better, while studying Tibetan and Sanskrit at the
University of Washington during the late 1950s, Smith was enlisted to
help acculturate a family of Tibetan refugees to life in the United
States. The head of the family was Deshung Rinpoche, one of the
most learned lamas to escape Tibet. During the years Smith
helped the family, he learned more than he taught and the experience
set the course for his amazing journey of finding and collecting the
endangered Tibetan texts which span a 1,500 year old literary
tradition. The film visits many of the places Smith lived and
visited during the course of his remarkable career - including Tibet,
Bhutan, China, Indonesia, Nepal. Furthermore interviews with Smith
and along with a wide assortment of family, friends, colleagues,
lamas, and others present a full portrait of a remarkable man.
A visually beautiful film which is scholarly, accessible and
inspiring.

Kim's top 10 narrative films from The
37th CIFF

1) WHEN DAY BREAKS, Serbia

2) KUMA, Austria

3) KEY OF LIFE, Japan

4) MATERIAL, South Africa

5) THE DISCOVERERS, USA

6) OMAMAMIA, Germany

7) UNFINISHED SONG, UK

8) MARIACHI GRINGO, USA

9) HIGHWAY, Nepal

10) PIETA, South Korea

Kim's top 10 documentaries

1) G-DOG, USA

2) ELEMENTAL, USA, Australia,
Canada, India

3) DIGITAL DHARMA, USA, China,
India, Tibet

4) HONOR FLIGHT, USA

5) SHEPARD & DARK, USA

6) LORD MONTAGUE, USA, UK

7) LITTLE WORLD, Spain

8) GIRL RISING, USA

9) DEAR MR. WATTERSON, USA

10) THE PUNK SYNDROME, Finland

Unfortunately I didn't see GOOD OL'
FREDA, the Roxanne T.
Mueller Audience Choice Award For Best Film. If i did it may have
made my top 10 as I heard great things about it.